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Thursday, July 14, 2016

29. Raman Raghav 2.0

From the moment Nawazuddin Siddiqui appears on the screen
with a deep scar coming from the top of his forehead all the way down to his
nose, he owns Raman Raghav 2.0. The man’s presence as the serial killer – no,
that’s not a spoiler – is as magnetic as it is repulsive. Anurag Kashyap seems
to have constructed him as the embodiment of everything that is despicable in
human nature. Physical, mental and sexual violence come to him naturally and
the police are no match for him. In fact, the police force is shown either as
deviant (Vicky Kaushal as the drug-addict police officer) or benign (soft
spoken, roly poly officers unable to give chase to a criminal).

The first half of RR2.0 is like a Dementor's kiss. It squeezes
out all hope and fear runs through like a slithering snake in the grass. You
have no control over it, you know it is around and you resignedly wait for it
to strike. The second half is somewhat of a relief as the hunter and the hunted
circle each other to an unexpected climax. While it is a relief from the
viewer’s perspective, I felt the storytelling weakened a bit. Thank God for
that!

Broken up into eight episodes, RR2.0 is a masterclass in the
making of thrillers. In the first half, The Sister episode is twenty two
minutes of pure terror. You don’t know what is going to happen. After a point,
you don’t know what to feel. Sickening violence – both physical and mental –
hit you in stomach, even inconsequential sequences building towards the climax.

In a way, RR2.0 is a classic chase thriller. A serial killer
is on the loose and a cop is after him. How it plays out is where it makes a
departure.

The hero is not like regular heroes. He is a misogynistic,
drug addicted, commitment-phobic asshole with whom women can't but fall in
love. The serial killer (seemingly) has none of the intellectual method of a
Hannibal Lecter or the smoothness that we see in American TV shows. The cop
snorts cocaine at a crime scene, with dead bodies lying around. The criminal
kills a woman and sings Sheila ki jawaani as a lullaby to her child. The
grungy, dirty, shady parts of Mumbai form an unusual backdrop where we flit
between nightclubs, dance bars, slums, sweatshops, claustrophobic 2BHKs and
even cramped lifts as unlikely scenes of action.

Raman Raghav is an iconic figure in Indian popular culture.
By putting that name in the title, a certain kind of expectation is raised and
RR2.0 uses that expectation very cleverly to create suspense and the eventual
denouement. It helps all the departments – art, makeup, casting, music and above
all, writing – perform magnificently and absolutely to the brief. And in the
end, RR2.0 doesn’t just kick ass. It kicks you in the balls.

Interesting tidbit: The promos for RR2.0 are different in a way because they have scenes that don't feature in the final film but give glimpses into the two main characters' psyche. Check out this, this, this and this in which the serial killer is finishing off people and this one in which the police officer recounts his life of crime.